Craftworking

My Datacenter

A while back I was working in a lab where we were building servers for various projects. The project would purchase some servers and I worked on getting them up and working. The lab eventually outgrew it's capacity to house all of the servers and supporting equipment. Something had to be done. The lab purchased some servers and loaded up VMware. No longer were were burdened with power, cooling and everything else that goes with dedicated hardware. For myself I thought this approach would solve the same problems here at home.

At my home, I had around a dozen PCs doing different things all running in different parts of the house. So if I could get rid of them and run everything from one machine, then I would free up a lot of floor space.

The first thing that needs to be done is to write down your requirements. The way I did this is to add up the memory on all my existing computers. For me this came to around 48gb of ram. For CPUs, it is a completely different calculation, since the number of processors doesn't equate equally to what is required for the VMwaare host. But for basic requirements I just added up the number of CPU cores. In my case it was about 20 cores. Now for the disk drives. All my computers harddrive space only added up to around 1Tb. Also I made note of the fastest computer I had. In my case it was 3.00Ghz.

Now I have some basic numbers to start with. I embarked on looking for a server to virtualize all of this. I looked at the heavy hitters such as HP and Dell, as well as several others. Most name brand servers are quite expensive even on Ebay. For the kind of horsepower I needed, servers were costing around $3000-$5000. I found that Oracle servers were much less than the others. There is a reason that I will get to later. For me it was the only thing in my budget. I picked up a Sun x4440 with 16 cores across 4 processors and 64gb of RAM. The processor speed was 2.7Ghz, which was close enough. The server is big. 2U in height and 29 in in length. It also weights in at over 60lbs. The nice thing is that it came in at under $2000.

What ever virtualization platform that is used, It is vitally important to read the hardware compatibility guide. Whether VMWare, Oracle, Xen or any other platform is used each vendor has one. Do not purchase equipment without reading the hardware list first. Only buy equipment that is listed. You will thank youself in the end. At the time the SUN hardware was supported.

My server came with only 2 146Gb sas harddrives. This is no problem since it only has the VMware software loaded. A SAN device is used for running all the virtual machines.